Tournament Basic Info
General Each week a new Tournament begins and lasts for 6 days with the following variables: * Each time using a different map * Each time using a different Blessed hero, granted super stats There are a total of 7 Leagues in the tournament - 2 introductory and 5 advanced. Be warned that once you go past the introductory leagues, you can never return to them. Introductory: # Bronze # Silver Advanced: # Gold # Platinum # Diamond # Master # Legendary Rules * All players in the same League compete on the same map ** This map can differ between Leagues though - often Diamond League & above will play on a different map than lower leagues * On a given map, the enemies are always the same - same numbers, type, order of appearance, etc. Everyone starts from the same beginning point - including you, each successive time you play * Each day for 6 days (Tuesday-Sundays) you can play through a map multiple times: *# once for free *# additional two times after watching an ad''' (unlimited at legendary league) *# unlimited times with gems, cost will increase each time by 50% untill 100gems per entry (9 > 14 > 21 > 30 > 45 > 68 > 100). Gem cost increase even when you use Ad for replay. ''!!! generally not good idea to spend gems this way !!!'' * Only limited items can be used for each attempt - usually 4 ** Mabyn's ''' Rank 6 - Magic Bag talent is the only known way to go past this limit ** In early? Leagues, you cannot use Meteors * Players are ranked according to performance - first by number of enemy kills (more) and then time (less). The best ranking is kept, and subsequent rankings discarded * Groups are created within each League, consisting of up to 30 players (up to 50 in legendary). Once that limit is reached, groups may be split up according to the of the first play of the tournament that week. Thus, a player's ranking may go down, if someone else performs better, or if additional players join. * Rewards are given to the top players within each Group - usually the top 10 players receive some award, while the rest of the players in a Group get none. ** e.g., the top player claims the Grand Prize, followed by a Big Prize, a Decent Prize, then 3 Common Prize winners, and 5 Small Prize ** in some Leagues the reward groups are expanded - e.g., 2 Big & 2 Decent Prizes, and 5 each of Common & Small Prizes, for a total of 15 rather than 10 awardees * The top players in each Group are also Promoted, to start in the next higher-up League the following week (except for the last week; and the last League grants the title of GrandMaster. Players that fail to get promoted remain in the same League the following week. ** Usually the top 3 players are promoted, but for some Leagues it is instead the top 5 ** Getting promoted too early can leave you unable to win in the next higher-up League - which can lead to some interesting strategies where early players may attempt to get the most rewards without actually getting promoted. * Every 3 months (or so) a new Season begins and the tournaments are all reset (if you passed Gold league, you begin there again when the season resets) It is this set of rules that makes Realm Defense a F2P rather than P2W game. Spending real-world money can help a player get better heroes and awaken them faster, but money absolutely cannot take the place of player skill. General Tournament Strategy Meteors * Use the forge to craft them * Try to conserve them - but then do use as needed (this may be hard to practice) * Do not try to use them on Bosses - the (percentage-based) damage will never be strong enough to kill them outright. Instead, focus their use on giant hordes. * Do not use on your first attempt(s) - until you have a better sense of whether it will be worthwhile, plus giving you the chance the assess the map's difficulty without items. Instead, fine-tune your strategy first, and then use meteors when you are fully ready. Heroes * It is almost always advantageous to play with the Blessed Hero ** The boost is give in absolute terms, so things like character level and stats gained from awakening ranks provide a much lesser effect than normal, while the greatest effects come from: (1) awakening ranks that provide additional Talents, and (2) unlocking of hero synergies. These of course depend on the hero. *** e.g., for Efrigid the effects of awakening her from R2 to R3 or R4 to R5 are fairly negligible, whereas getting her to R4 or R6 provide a dramatic change. *** for Lancelot these steps are 3 & 6. *** for Yan, although she has a great combo that she can do with other heroes even @ her R5, awakening her to R6 unlocks 2 powerful synergies, without which it is difficult to win tournaments when other players have them. * It is also almost always advantageous to take advantage of synergies provided in combination with the blessed hero. ** Synergies are very powerful as some Heroes can boost other Heroes (and sometimes towers too), with often humongous benefits. *** One example is Fee, who is almost never seen in Tournament play except when she is Blessed (her approach of many-hits-with-low-damage does not scale well to super-powered-up enemies with tough armor). When that happens, players are usually seen to win with her plus 2 of either Smoulder, Bolton, or Narlax, to power her up via her Blessed Bow talent gained at R6. This hero synergy provides much greater damage than Fee is able to do alongside more generically useful heroes such as Raida and Koizuul, who are seen in more tournament situations than any other heroes, but provide no synergy to Fee. ** All hero synergies are listed at the Tournament Detailed Strategy page * In higher-level Leagues, having the blessed hero, and their synergy partners, is almost always mandatory to win, because of the large magnitude of the boost above more generically-useful heroes. ** e.g. in Fee's example, having her @ R6 to take advantage of this synergy, and having at least two of the aforementioned heroes to provide it, is crucial * In lower-level Leagues it may be possible to win without the blessed hero, if not many other players in your particular group have her @R6 yet, or lack the other heroes necessary to provide or receive it. To win, you just have to get a higher ranking than other players - however you can achieve it. * In addition to the Blessed hero, it is also useful to bring along heroes that are situationally useful ** The heroes that are useful in nearly every situation include Koizuul, Raida, and Connie - i.e., the Meta ** Other heroes are useful for other various situations - including anti-air configurations, late-wave physical bosses, or just those that provide several various synergies or other combos. *** For maps with many flying enemies, you may want 1 or 2 (or even 3 for *very* flier-heavy maps!?) of the following: Raida, Smoulder, Azura, Helios, or Connie. Different heroes are more useful for different situations - e.g., whether the birds cluster tightly together (Raida) or are more spread out (Smoulder, Azura, Connie), and whether the map has many ranged attackers (Helios), etc. *** Caldera is extremely useful to tank late-wave Bosses in higher tournament Leagues (Legendary?), although his utility as a general tank seems mainly a matter of preference *** Koizuul, Yan, and Narlax provide more synergies than any other heroes. Technically Leif does too, but the effect is so slight that they have never been seen to be useful in tournaments :-( To Play or Not to Play * Some people suggest to try to join later in the week, to avoid being grouped together with stronger players who tend to join earlier ** However, if this were true and all players did it, then it would not work? * More to the point, especially if you lack the blessed hero or another hero that has a necessary synergy with them, you may choose to start earlier (ASAP?) in order to gain maximum practice in the Tournament style of play, which is a bit different from other modes of play (e.g., this is the only one where meteors are absolutely required to be competitive with other players) * At the very least, try to play each Tournament at least once (even if you do not use consumables). Especially in the lower Leagues, sometimes players will even win rewards accidentally this way, as they beat players without strong heroes, having lesser skill, or that were perhaps attempting to keep their scores lower to avoid being promoted to a higher league too early. This also is a great way to see what types of heroes are good for what situations - i.e., playing at least once allows you to see the winning hero line-ups, so that you can get a sense of what heroes you want to prioritize first in order to win tournaments yourself in the future. * To see the winning heroes, look either in the Group tab for the ranking within your particular group (after you've played at least once to start the current tournament), or the League tab for the top scores across all groups in your League. In both, you can safely ignore the "skin" variations that can make a hero's picture look a bit differently than usual (these are all purely cosmetic, although they do denote players that have been around long enough to obtain that particular skin, either bought from tournament wins or in an event), but instead pay particular attention to the color of the border around the hero. This is the same color scheme as the central piece that you can see for your own heroes in the Hero Camp: ** Bronze = R0 ("Bronze") ** Silver = R1-2 ("Silver I" and "Silver II") ** Gold = R3-5 ("Gold I", "Gold II", and "Gold III") ** Purple = R6 ("Platinum") Tower Placement * The towers & play strategies that are useful in tournaments can be *very* different than those useful in campaign mode. This is mostly b/c your heroes should be doing most of the damage in your tournaments. Although some parts remain the same (kill the enemies ftw! also use choke points where available, etc.). Note that tournaments have both many more enemies, and each one of them is MUCH tougher, than their counterparts in the normal campaign. RS is similar in the toughness component, but tournament play is fairly unique in the hordes of enemies that flood your way. * Tips for early-stage players: ** When you first start out, if your heroes are not very powerful, then you need to rely on towers to get you as far as you can. Even so, you have little chance to win against a player who has a better hero (e.g., your R6 Lancelot cannot compete effectively against a R6 Koizuul - unless perhaps Lancelot is blessed? and possibly not even then). Still, playing can be fun, can help you learn, and even if you do not "win", perhaps you can place high enough in the list to earn some smaller rewards. ** Since there are many more enemies, focus mainly on towers with aoe attacks. e.g. for W1, cannons are better than archers, unless there are many birds, in which case make sure to use archers to get them, and mages can help concentrate enemies, as well as boost both your heroes+barracks guys. * Tips for late-stage players: ** Increasingly though, as you progress through the game, your heroes will get better (both by unlocking and then purchasing new ones, and awakening them further in RS), at which point damage done by towers will become comparatively negligible in later waves of the tournament. At that point, a different set of towers becomes more useful for this different purpose: specifically, those that power-up or otherwise enhance your heroes. ** In W1, an example is the mage tower, which boosts your heroes' speed (note: multiple instances of this same tower type do not stack, although other types of speed boosting can be stacked on top of each other, such as different hero buffs plus the haste from this tower), and also helps to concentrate enemies so that heroes with good CC can take them out. Barracks can also be helpful here, since even if they die almost immediately they can slow down enemies long enough to let your heroes do other tasks (as a side note: fully-upgraded barracks that are boosted by mage towers can deal some of the most significant damage done by towers in the entire game - which again...is still almost negligible). Archer towers are also extremely important, if there are birds present, since unlike the case for ground enemies, heroes are not capable of doing significant damage to large numbers of fliers. Cannons are not used at all by experienced players. ** In W2, mage/lightning towers... ** In W3, archer towers with full bugs also provide a slowing effect... ** etc. __FORCETOC__ Category:Tournament Category:Important Category:Game Modes